Sunday, February 27, 2011

Hollerado: Record in a Bag

"Juliette" came roaring into my life one early 2010 day. I was at work, trying not to listen to the radio as usual -- we have a 4-hour loop of current hits that enables each of us employees to get very familiar with the every Justin Bieber song's intricacies. Then over the speakers came roaring this gigantic riff, this vintage garage sound worthy of the Kinks, but with a modern sheen and a great chorus. My ears perked up. I knew this was something I needed in my life.

It arrived later: Record in a Bag. As the title suggests, it is quite literally a record in a bag. The CD case sits in a plastic ziploc bag full of confetti and other goodies. The confetti is appropriate, since the music contained on the CD is a pure celebration, from their bombastic guitars to their pulsing drums to their weary-yet-charming vocals. The title, prosaic and direct, was fitting for the sound of it: Hollerado are stylish, but not afraid to be honest about what they are, this ragged-sounding, classicist rock band. No tricks or games, but everything they do, they do creatively and excellently.

I was skeptical when I first put the disc in and heard the deliberately jokey "Holleradoland" -- yeah, it has character, but I usually like to get down to business with my opening tracks. So for me, the album begins with the second track, "Do the Doot Da Doot Do," which swings gleefully from its nonsensical refrain, with manic energy and squealing guitars. From then, Hollerado makes some of the most full-bodied rock and roll heard in decades, with more rhythm and heart than I'd heard in years. Vocalist Menno Versteeg wails with wild abandon and enthusiasm, and the band plays in kind, with an earnest sense of humour to boot.

See, that's what I like about this day and age. Some of our best bands, writers and performers have mastered the art of being fun and being funny while also being sincere and deep. Because that depth doesn't always come from the extreme-ness of your expression -- your louder yelling, your supposedly more meaningful lyrics -- it can come from a small moment that seems to symbolize everything. On the road-tripping "On My Own," they sing, "There's a sweater in my dresser drawer that I wear when I'm sick / But the winter's finally over so I won't be bringin' it." It's so weird that this little snapshot couplet can cover so much. Hollerado is ultimately about the little things: they throw in great little guitar moments, nifty background vocals, and interstitial moments like whistling and organs and a capella intros. When was the last time you felt like you could describe an album as "clever?" And not even in a way that implies sarcasm, smugness, or terminal irony.

'Cause yes, it rocks. They make that abundantly clear on the now-viral "Americanarama," which eventually occurred to me as a sort of transatlantic "London Calling," as the band marvels at the country's self-destruction by apparently natural means. "Heyyyyy Philadelphiaaaa / Where'd you go?" is a clarion call for the new decade. Other tracks backing the album up run from the sunny, reflective "Riverside," to the country-blues-inflected "Hard Love," and "Got To Lose," which seems to be an ode both to heartbreak and to natural selection: "We came down from the trees, singing / You've got to lose love if you want to find love!" ("You've got to looooose! You've got to looooose!") I didn't like this lyric until I thought about "find" as a verb and realized it wasn't about having love but that thrill of finding it all over again. And somehow that evolution metaphor seems to work. Then there's "Fake Drugs," which is a good bit of plastic funk, and "Walking On The Sea," which sounds like it might've been at home on a late-90's Big Shiny Tunes compilation. The lonely, jaunty, whistling outro bleeds perfectly to the revelry that comprises the final track.

"What's Everybody Running For?" closes the album urgently, breathlessly, as the band observes the chaos that ensues when the only bar in a small town (they hail from Manotick, Ontario) burns to the ground. The album seems to carry a loose narrative about a road trip through post-apocalyptic North America, but maybe that's all in my head, and maybe it's all tongue in cheek. And it ends with a warm, discrete in-studio applause that feels genuine because whether you noticed or not, something has been accomplished.

Not only did 2010 sound like this album for me, but this album sounds quintessentially 2010 -- present and ready for action, joking, half-serious, fun and uncontrollable. Jose Strummer once said he was partial to albums "made by adolescents" (I'm thinking he meant 20-somethings rather than 12-year-olds) and this is exactly what he was talking about.

This was my favourite album of 2010. I didn't expect it to be -- for a while about half of the album sat unlistened-to while I found better things to do, until curiosity got the better of me, along with the nagging feeling that I was missing something. Then when I was first making this list up it occurred to me how much more I enjoyed listening to this album all year than anything else. It has so much heart and so much spirit, it feels like it's been with me all along.

Look. It's no great critical statement to say Arcade Fire made a great album in 2010, or Gorillaz or Kanye or LCD Soundsystem. But when even Black Keys' down and dirty brand of blooze-rock gets treated like a novelty, I have to wonder, who is standing up for pure good old fashioned rock and roll? Unassuming, unadorned, raw, fun-ass rock? It may not consider itself a great piece of art, but this album was made to be enjoyed and it's plainly irresistible. It doesn't even sound conventional, going way off the rails at any moment with enthusiasm and life. This is what people are thinking when they think of the power of rock. And from a pure enjoyment standpoint, I don't see things getting much better.

At my job, I have the occasional opportunity to offer recommendations. Sometimes people actually ask me for advice, and sometimes their tastes align closely enough with mine that I feel like I can take a stab, and in those cases, I usually reach for this album. I tell them "Look, I'll play you one song and you don't have to buy it, but I'm positive you will walk out of here with this album in your hands." And they always do. This isn't music you keep behind a velvet rope and dust off every once in a while to do some appreciatin'. This is music you keep with you.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Record in a Bag is the final installment of my 4-part "Favourites of 2010" series. Albums 4-2 were: Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record, Locksley's Be In Love, and Zeus' Say Us. The point of this exercise was not to create a pure monolithic ranking of all music from 2010, but to think about what I like and why, both as a means of creating dialogue about music and expressing my tastes, which may help you understand the background of my own reviews. Thanks for indulging me! Here's music:



Thursday, February 24, 2011

Nick Drake: Pink Moon

When I was 13, my dad set up a bedroom at his place for me, for when I visited every other weekend. His house was only halfway across town from mine, but it felt further. There was nothing in the room but the bed. Beyond that it was bare, totally un-lived-in, with plain institutional white walls and hardwood floors. I remember lying there in the drafty darkness, maybe with some muffled sound drifting up from the living room stereo but more likely in total silence, feeling completely, insanely alone. Like there was nothing left in the universe to comfort me. I was a pretty dramatic 8th-grader.

Not surprisingly, those feelings were drudged back up when listening to this album. It's so personal and intimate, it could have been recorded in that room. Could have been written in that room. There's nothing I can detect on the record other than Drake's voice and his guitar, plucked and strummed delicately, softly, like he can barely even compel himself to play. You can feel fingers on frets, hear the occasional string twang out of tune. Most of the songs wind up sounding similar, giving the eerie feeling that no matter how hard he tries, Drake never truly gets catharsis. Not surprisingly, after this album's release, and failure to be a commercial success, he withdrew completely and died of an overdose of medication that may have been accidental, maybe not. I'm not about stories like these when it comes to enjoying music, but it helps give a way to think about the music itself.

Because for all his weary sadness, Drake's voice has a warmth to it. Maybe it's his accent or his quiet, whispery way of singing, but it feels very not-dead-yet. The title track, with lyrics that foresee doom, has more awe and wonder at the prospect when he sings, "Pink, pink, pink, pink." The lyrics on that song, as throughout the album, are spare and repetitive, trapped in themselves. The lyrics throughout the album shun the world, shun the self, shun the song. On "Know," he can barely stand to make syllables while he plucks his progressively less melodic guitar over and over. "Know that I love you / Know that I don't care / Know that I see you / Know I'm not there" Then there's the slow, solemn articulation and descent of the instrumental "Horn." There's a mystical, unearthly quality to his despair.

I could go on. At times it seems like Drake is doing a very bad job convincing himself that better times are ahead ("I can take a road that'll see me through") but it takes a very dark mood to come up with "Take a look, you may see me in the dirt / I am the parasite that hangs from your skirt." There's a delicate touch that goes into making a record this achingly personal, this heartbreaking, without making it seem overwrought, forced, or desperate for attention. When I'm mad, I don't go off into spastic fits of rage, but I do sulk, deep and long, and try not to signify it to others, though I usually can't keep it from showing somehow. It seems like a very private pain that was caught on record.

So that brings me to "From The Morning" the album closer, mellow, sweet and sentimental, (as are a few other the other tracks,) but there's a sigh in his voice when he sings, "A day once dawned, and it was beautiful." There's beauty in the world, at least there was once, for Nick Drake. And that's the sad truth, even the beauty of the world can be hurtful from a certain vantage point.

There's a paradox to a record like this. You can't possibly listen to it when you're in a good mood. But if you're down, real low, and you need music that shares your pain, you'll put it on, or a record like this, and by the end, maybe you'll feel like you're not alone. Drake's tragedy was maybe that he didn't have that feeling, but how amazingly he was able to share it with others, even if he wasn't discovered until after his death. Haunting, beautiful.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Cover: Zeus, "That's All"



I'm going to devote one post per week to a great or at least interesting cover. It's an idea that's been kicking around my head for a while, but I wasn't sure how to introduce the notion. Then while I was writing up Zeus' Say Us, I happened upon this track from their EP, a cover of Genesis' "That's All." I've never thought that much of Genesis, but it's a pretty decent song and tackled by this group it becomes an intense atomic hurricane siren.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Zeus: Say Us

It begins simply, with the anxious tapping of percussion, the drumsticks against the rim of the snare drum, and ends in a swell of instruments, pianos, slide guitars, gorgeously drenched harmonies and whirling organs. In the twelve tracks it takes to get there, everything happens. Maybe.

At first glance, the debut album by Zeus seems to be easy to put your finger on, but the more I listened to it, the more overtaken I was by its various elements. The songs are too well-constructed to be jammy trips, and yet just a step or two off balance with pop songwriting. The instruments, passed from member to member along with the microphone, are rarely used the same way twice. Albums like Say Us are the reason I like albums: sometimes they add up to a beguiling whole that goes beyond the individual songs on them. And as distinct as those songs are, they still feel unified, propelled from one to the next, broken only by the imaginary, fabricated designation on the package: "Side A / Side B."

"How Does It Feel?" the song that opens the album with those taps (which soon give way to sympathetic pianos and mocking guitars,) unfolds in its 2:49 as a blueprint for the rest of the album: do as much as you can, one thing after the other, as well as possible. So when the guitars and pianos clash back and forth like a duet, the guitars raise the stakes with a blistery solo but the pianos get the last laugh as they climb into the clouds for that last chorus.

Like that song, the album slowly unfolds itself, showing its tricks one after another and never lingering, never repeating. It's like (don't say it, urges a voice inside me,) Abbey Road, where every contributor is given full support and helps build the whole, whether it be the country-blues of "The River By The Garden" or the hazy "Fever Of The Time." None of it feels like a genre exercise, and though the mysterious lyrics often keep the listener at bay, it also never has to reach for sincerity. It's all in the expression.

The second half excites me more than the first, with one of the finest moments coming in the changeover between "You Gotta' Teller" and "I Know." The former track is a monstrous, charged, organ-based thundering rocker that sounds like Vanilla Fudge doing "You Keep Me Hanging On." The latter is a dreamy, galloping plea for sympathy. When the urgent heat of "Teller" is finally brought to its end, there's just a brief moment of quiet, before the cool breath of "I Know" drifts in with its quivering beauty. "Now I know, now I know / How it feels, how it feels..." although what "it" is is never explicitly said. The lyrics throughout this thing as a whole form an exhaustive exploration of communication.

No matter who is writing each individual song, or who is playing what, most of them tend to come back to: thinking, feeling, speaking, hearing, interpreting, understanding, wondering, knowing and telling. The songs encompass this impressive scope by doing their work to convey or obscure feelings. "Marching Through Your Head," with its pulsing pianos, manages to get into sound that feeling of pacing back and forth trying to work out a problem with your lover, "Do you feel it all the time / the way she preys upon your mind? / She's a fiend for your love, and that's all..." combined with the most effective hook on the album, the one that will most likely be marching through your head, but will keep surprising you when you come back to it. Or the loving, longing "The Sound of You," which takes a person's voice as their essence, and wonders, "How could we know, how could we know, how could we know?" The album closer (after the gathering storm of "Heavy On Me") is "At The Risk of Repeating," which is another tune about trying to get at the heart of the matter and still coming up short. But what words can't say, music often does. That music often has enough power, or enough charm, to keep you coming back.

I don't know if it's really the musical variety, or the lyrical mystery that kept me coming back to this album. It's just amazing how good it sounds, how well it does quiet and modest, as well as powerful and anguished. The boys in Zeus attack their tunes like a bunch of seasoned vets taking on excellent new material: the music is in them and it's in their nature to get it out.

Say Us doesn't make a grand statement, it's a rather unassuming record with many great surprises that aren't necessarily obvious the first time you listen. You'll think "This is a pretty good song," once or twice every five minutes and put it away and forget it, but if even a scrap of a tune remains in your brain, you'll want to take it out again and sooner or later it'll get into you. Tellingly, Zeus' debut EP (does anyone buy those or are they just a lark?) was called Sounds like Zeus. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with any easier way to explain their sound. I even stooped to a Beatles comparison. But, speaking as a guy who has struggled to express himself once or twice in the past (I know, hard to believe,) this album speaks for itself. It's something you've just gotta feel for yourself.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Say Us by Zeus was the third installment in my 4-part "Favourites of 2010" -- it comes in at #2, ahead of Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record and Be in Love by Locksley.



"Not Really Into Radiohead" - A Story (or Something)

It's Wednesday, the 16th of February, 2011. After class, I head out for pizza with my friend Robin at a little place on Bloor. We've never really hung out that much so there's a lot to talk about, and the topic turns, as it so often seems to, to music. I mention that in January, I started up a music blog, and she beams: "You know what you should review next? Radiohead." Earlier that week, the band had announced the upcoming release of its album The King of Limbs, in a mere week's time.

It had a weird sort of synchronicity for me. I had just bought a recent Q Magazine (yeah, holy shit, print media, what?) whose feature article was "The Top 250 Albums of Q's Lifetime." This stretches back to Paul Simon's Graceland, which they had praised in their first issue, and which my aunt tried to get me to listen to, but when she lent me the CD, the case was empty, so that's on her. Anyway, out of all these amazing albums (including all the usual suspects and some real surprises, both good and bad) the top-rated album, voted by Q's readers, was Radiohead's OK Computer. So yes, good, great, more credible than, say, Tubthumper by Chumbawumba (underrated.)

This is going to shock you, coming from the guy who's taken it on himself to ramble about music on the internet, but: I'm not into Radiohead. Now, it shouldn't shock you, since I've mentioned before that I spent a long, long period of time "not really being into current music," so when In Rainbows was surprise-released in 2007, I was still kinda like "Good for them, but whatever." This isn't out of a lack of support for their music -- I'm genuinely glad they exist -- but it was more me finding my own path. As you know from my previous rants, the last thing I'm interested in is listening to an album others have said is great and echoing those sentiments. So Radiohead's greatness has been well covered, I find something else to listen to. I was content to let them exist as this unknown paragon of musical greatness that had nothing whatsoever to do with me and my tastes. It seemed impossible to get into Radiohead without having to drill through the layers of mystique their music engendered. I'm basically saying I was worried that what I heard wouldn't justify the hype for me.

Something happened in the middle of 2010 -- I'll explain later -- that changed my perspective on this, and basically made this blog possible. And though I'm not always talking about it, this is after all a blog about musical discovery, and it's probably about time I discover Radiohead for myself. Much like the Arcade Fire example I spoke about last week, I won't be hearing King of Limbs for a while yet, and whatever my opinion ends up being, you get my guarantee that it'll just be mine.

I felt the need to say that, because after all the stuff I have already lined up, I wouldn't want people to shy away from this blog thinking "Why the fuck isn't he talking about Radiohead? Everyone else is, this guy sucks."

Maybe I do suck, but at least you know why I'm not talking about Radiohead yet.

If you still hunger for more Radiohead content, I'm happy to endorse this article by my buddies over at Comics! The Blog (although it seems unfair since you never hear me jabbering about Spider-Man.) From a gen-yoo-wine Radiohead fan.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto

Saturday, February 19, 2011

John Legend & The Roots: Wake Up!

An album like this poses a unique problem for a sonically-inclined listener like me. It sounds great, but it's also music with a purpose. Primarily a collection of socially-conscious soul covers, this album has a message. My question is: is it the time and place for the message, and are people going to listen?

It probably doesn't say a lot about the state of the world that we might need the same songs of 40-odd years ago to address our problems today, but as long as people are struggling these songs will be relevant, so I guess that's forever. The songs are all pretty powerful, and taken together they form a cohesive concept: a call to wake up and remember that there's still work to be done, for races, for society, for countries, for everybody.

But the source of this material is so rich because back when these songs were written, people were not only keen to speak out, but to listen... probably. There are so many of them because it was part of a movement. Without the context that created them, Legend's project runs the risk of becoming a tribute instead of a re-invigoration of their ideals. Instead of a movement, it might just be a moment.

That's no fault of Legend's, the Roots, the producers, the songwriters, or anybody. And things can't change overnight. The album doesn't have the answers, but it's willing to admit there's a problem. Too often in America nowadays -- shit, in Canada too -- the attitude seems to be "Everything's fine except the economy and the opposing political party." People aren't as good at being pissed off as they used to be. Maybe we're all being pacified. Shit, I know I am. It's hard to make a change, whether you're in a position to enact any or not. This album is a step in the right direction, but it knows it can't do all the work. The songs don't have all the answers, but they don't pretend to.

Anyway. The album sounds great: all the benchmarks of vintage soul, funk, motown and r&b are in the mix, as well as hip hop that calls to attention the urgency of certain situations without overpowering either the message or the sound. I can't really go through and critique every single track, but "I Can't Write Left-Handed," the wartime protest song by Bill Withers, sounds especially current, affects me the most, and gets the best performance. Legend makes his opening statement clear, though on the gripping soul of "Hard Time," and the "cut the bullshit" of "Compared to What," two general statements of uplift. The album taps the vein of soul by sounding urgent and deep throughout, but I worry that in going for a classic sound, Legend & Co undermine their own work, causing the listener to think maybe it really is all in the past. So, it's problematic: it's great-sounding music that risks turning itself into a gimmick by existing outside the pop continuum.

I don't personally require that all music have a message, or do anything but sound good, but it's true that songs are a great way to convey something important. My hope is that this becomes a trend rather than a single event. That more albums like this come out and keep people thinking about the possibilities of their own lives, and that even if they don't start forming revolutionary groups, they at least take the steps they need to help themselves and to help others. It's easy to wake people up, it's not so easy to get them to stay up.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Rolling Stone's "Choose the Cover" Contest

Granted, the magazine has fallen in stature since the days of Dr. Hook's unforgettable hit, "The Cover of the Rolling Stone" but give Rolling Stone credit for attempting to use its sway to try to make a few new stars. It is currently hosting a contest to determine which unsigned band will not only feature on the cover of a future issue, but also get a recording contract with Atlantic records. This prospect seems almost quaint in a day and age when a group can become a hit act without having a contract or even a physical CD, but as we know, just because an act can become a hit without those things doesn't mean suddenly every band on the internet becomes superstars without something you can buy in stores. Call this, then, American Idol for worthwhile acts.

The question becomes a democratized: which band do you think should get the bump? Which is most deserving, most representative of our readers' tastes? Who deserves a career? And in truth, which I clicked the link, I expected mainly generic rock and R&B and pop acts and stuff you can generally make in your basement, with maybe on or two standouts that would provide an easy choice. I thought I'd hear mainly reflections and imitations of already-popular acts. To RS' credit, I was pretty much wrong.

Most, if not all, of the acts currently in the running deserve a shot. Some of them are good and some of them seem like they might be brilliant. Most of them don't seem like they're just trying to have a hit or appeal to the broadest audience. Going through them, the choice was a tough one, but I knew I wanted to bring attention to it on this blog, and I figured to do that, I should have a favourite.

The Romany Rye reminds me of My Morning Jacket, with harmonies, big hooks and blues licks. Despite my initial reservations, Fictionist's melancholy "Before I'm Old" is pretty affecting as it slowly builds to a stadium-sized hand-clapper. Jamestown Revival has a real down-home swampiness, and The Sheepdogs do Led Zeppelin as well as the Black Crowes. Solo females Leila Broussard and Skyler Stonestreet avert and work beyond the big-vocal female artists on the racks right now in their own ways. There's a genre-busting soul-r&b act called Tha Boogies, and an act reminiscent of Metric called Ume.

My personal favourites would be either PK (The Cars plus The Strokes?) or The Americans (tidal wavey neo-psychedelia blues) because they are simply the weirdest of the bunch and I would like to see how they played out over an entire album, but just because I endorse them doesn't mean I necessarily like their songs that much better than Broussard or the Sheepdogs or Fictionist. They've just left me with the idea that I'd want to hear more.

But I can't choose favourites. Fortunately, I don't think you're expected to, as you can star every act according to your own opinions and I guess the top eight move on. If you're so inclined, you can star all but the one band you don't want to win. Because I've had such a hard time disliking any of these acts, I'll be interested to see not only who wins, but whether this contest ultimately gets them to the top of the heap. I want to be cynical about this whole affair, but really, there's a lot of potential here. If this is an accurate sampling of the next few years of popular music, there's something to get excited about.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Not a review of The Suburbs by Arcade Fire (or Arcade Fire by The Suburbs)

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people who are fans of Eminem, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, etc had/have no idea who The Arcade Fire is. I myself am not overly familiar with their music. I first heard the song "Rebellion (Lies)" in a car full of my hipstery friends in the summer of 2005, right after we'd graduated high school, when I was still very reluctant to get into any current music, underground or otherwise. I thought the song was very good, but never bothered to follow up on it. Years later, I am working in a record store, so yes, I'd better know who Arcade Fire is. A couple nights ago they won the Album of the Year Grammy, an award that apparently millions of people felt they had a stake in. Weird.

I don't have the album yet, but we've had it on in the store so I've at least been able to go through it if not sit down with it the way I like to with new music; so my opinion is a passing one, but one of approval. I'm also fairly familiar with all the other nominees through their singles. Whether I love The Suburbs or not, there's not a shred of doubt in my mind that the right album won that award. I don't think that's a controversial stance for me to take on this blog, considering what I believe my audience to be.

I mean, on the one hand, you've got Katy Perry, who I like least out of all the pop divas to emerge in the last few years, and Lady Antebellum, whose song "'Murkin Honey" should be firebombed straight to hell -- the ghosts of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams should beat the shit out of it for what's become of the Country racks. On the other hand is Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster, which would have stood a better chance if it had been more of a complete album, rather than an expansion of her previous one, which if nothing else provides much confusion to my customers. Lastly is Eminem, which is... I mean, I've said before that I haven't got a critical ear for rap, so people tell me it's good and I believe them, but at the same time it doesn't sound like a return to form as much as it does a safe bet. I could've seen it winning, but it would've been like Scorsese winning the Oscar for The Departed. Nobody seems to believe that was on its own merits.

That leaves Arcade Fire, the band the fans of these artists never heard of, who recorded a work on a level far removed from the others. I mean not in terms of quality, but in terms of effort, creativity and spirit. The very fact that they were nominated seems like an award in and of itself. Them winning is just a little mind-blowing.

But adding to this complexity is the fact that this award more often than not seems to be given to something nobody heard, even though the pop-music fans are the ones most invested. This gives the award, in a way, a measure of legitimacy, of being above popularity. You probably don't know many people who bought Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, or River: The Joni Letters by Herbie Hancock, but they won out over Radiohead, Coldplay, Lil Wayne, Kanye, Amy Winehouse and the Foo Fighters in their respective years. a glance at the history of the award reveals this is often the case, although there will never be a justification for giving it to Blood Sweat & Tears over Abbey Road. Occasionally, what's popular and what's award-worthy does line up, as in the case of Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, or Fearless by Taylor Swift, which won last year by being the least of five evils (the fucking Black Eyed Peas were nominated.)

Anyway. Too often the popular and the artistic are separated in music and held to wildly different standards. I'm also worried that holding them to the same standards is even more dangerous, since considering an album like The Suburbs requires entirely different brand of critical thought from an album like The Fame Monster. There's actually no way to compare them, and the lack of winning this award doesn't invalidate anyone's feelings about their music. Consider the "Best Alternative Album" category, where Brothers by the Black Keys beat out The Suburbs. Maybe it was just more alternative.

If I do end up reviewing the album, there is one thing I want to do: not fall prey to the hype. It's so easy to listen to an album billed as awesome and go in attempting to hear what others have said is there. It's also too easy to go in trying to find what's wrong with it and try to point it out to people. Either way, a review of an album like this, especially so far after the fact, is tricky because it's not going to change anybody's mind either way. But I like to write reviews not to argue with people, but to figure out what I like for myself. So it's still on my to-do list.

And I hope, Grammy or no Grammy, you're true to your own tastes too.

Keep on rockin
-Scotto

Monday, February 14, 2011

My Bloody Valentine: Come In Alone



Because maybe you guys deserve a less sarcastic Valentine.

Nirvana: Heart-Shaped Box



Happy Valentine's Day everybody.

Arkells: Jackson Square

When you're down on your luck, striking out at a party or on the outs with your woman, stumbling out of a bar at 3 AM steadying yourself against a brick wall to get your bearings while you piss and trying to remember which way is home -- and worse, you're not certain you've made the right choices in life and know you can't go back -- your theme song is "John Lennon" by The Arkells. It captures a snapshot of too many wasted nights and fucked-up romances. It has that right balance between staggering weight and light bouncy rock, between self-deprecation and triumphant anthem. And if no other song on Jackson Square gets into you, I think this one will. It's not even that easy of a song, constantly shuffling its pace around and playing with its refrain, without ever sounding like anything but a rock classic... which it would be even without name-checking the young icon in its amazing singalong refrain "I'm John Lennon / In '67".

The Arkells (or maybe just "Arkells" or perhaps "some Arkells") play a good brand of everyman rock that traces its genes back to that mythical, possibly nonexistent era in the late-mid-60's before psychedelia had gripped every band and the only thing combatting the British Invasion was Motown. The sticker on the CD proclaims it as "Black and Blue Eyed Soul" and it definitely has that rough edge to it, for better or worse, but its best moments feature irresistible grooves.

It took a while for me to get into, though. It opens with a trio of songs that don't do it for me, most especially "Pullin' Punches," which sounds a bit too much like what everyone expects a hit rock single to sound like in the 2000's: Foo Fighters or Kings of Leon. But the band is better than that, and is eager to prove itself (despite its ode to slacking off, "Oh, the Boss is Coming!") "The Ballad of Hugo Chavez," "Tragic Flaw" and "No Champagne Socialist" swing along with great ease. "Chavez" borrows the guitars from The Beatles' "Getting Better," and puts them to hard work. "Tragic Flaw" sounds like an earthy, fleshed-out, soulful version of The Offspring, with its tense beat and riff adding to the lyrical study of a jealous guy trying to reassure himself. "Champagne Socialist," about the importance of practicing what you preach, takes flight with harmonica breaks while the guitars bubble under the verses like boiling water.

The album's a bit prone to filler: there's a couple tracks I'd rather not hear, but the band does often get hot. "I'm Not The Sun" is one of the most powerful ballads I've heard in years, where Max Kerman's vocals carry a serious burden while the guitars climbs the walls and absolve him. His voice does have a soulful quality that sometimes seems overworked, but usually adds the right weight to the song. With his delivery, the refrain of "John Lennon" comes off as both celebratory and resentful: it was indeed a complicated time to be a Beatle that year.

It all culminates with the hot-shit rave of "Blueprint," a song about getting over your personal obstacles and bettering yourself -- yeah, from the band that earlier was singing about slacking while the boss was off, and about wanting your girlfriend to wear baggy sweatsuits so dudes don't check her out. In a way, the album does seem to contain a through-line about personal betterment and overcoming. That is, the struggle to stay true to yourself, without sinking too deep into your own flaws, and that's a weirdly self-conscious subject to write rock music about. Then again, I could be reading too much into it.

I wonder about the band's status as a "retro" act, that dismissive and diminishing notion. Their album cover and name sorta call up images of the early 60's, of Phil Spector or Berry Gordy, but in sound, like I said, it's nostalgia for the never-was. Maybe the title, a shout-out to a depressingly-deserted mall in their hometown of Hamilton, ON, is a signal about their intentions to rebuild and improve the ideas about the past into something tangible and real. Like Locksley, they call up a time that didn't actually happen. So in the 2000's, when music can be (and frequently is) anything, I do dig records that go back and give us what we think we remember hearing. All this is in the service of what that music from the longago-times was trying to do: grow up but keep rocking. Here's music with some life in it. Some heart and soul. Embrace.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

White Stripes: Icky Thump

I'm desperately fighting the urge to use my write-up/review/rambling thingy on The White Stripes' (apparent) final album to sum up my thoughts on their career as a group, but I can't really bring myself to do that. Mainly, of course, that's because that's not what I do here. Here, we talk about music more than musicians, and while there's always plenty of overlap, you can get the verdict on Jack and Meg's place in the history books plenty of other places. Me, I just like clicking "play."

There's such an air of bullshit surrounding the critical discourse of the band: from their brother/sister persona, Jack's retro tastes and their stripped-down sound, every review I read barely seems capable of approaching the music on the level of "something you listen to." And I get it, the band is fertile ground for meta-commentary, but if you're thinking too hard about it, you're not really doing your job (unless you're actually my ole Pop Music Professor, Josh Pilzer) and you're kinda missing out.

In re-listening to Icky Thump, I felt a mixture of sadness and contentment. Sadly, the band that recorded this CD had called it quits. Happily, this was the one to go out on. It's an unlikely choice for "consensus best Stripes album," but I think it's the one we can mostly agree on. White Blood Cells has (as do its predecessors) the potential of being an overrated indie darling, Elephant could be considered a problematic follow-up, and Get Behind Me Satan wears its oddness proudly. Any of those albums might be better, but Icky Thump? Icky Thump, I think, is the record everyone was waiting for the band to record. On it, Jack breaks his own rules (what with all the keyboards and organs and bagpipes and trumpets mingling with the guitars) writes several crash-and-bang rockers, a strong ballad or two, and just generally seems to be having a ball. Meg's there too, I think. Yet despite this obviously embellished sound, it never seems to violate Stripes "canon," and the songs foreground all the appropriate elements to feel familiar but fresh.

The album starts with probably their most potent opening salvo ever: four great tracks, all with their own unique qualities. The title track (a White Stripes first!) is that rare outwardly-political statement from a man who felt more at home stumping for Charles Foster Kane than any current candidate. It thumps ominously into being, militaristically while Jack yowls his frantic lyrics, which tie together in that cool postmodern Becklike way all the kids are imitating these days. Depending on your sympathies, you may not care for "White Americans, what? nothing better to do / Why don't ya kick yourselves out, you're an immigrant too!" but who can argue with "Who's using who / What should we do? / Well you can't be a pimp and a prostitute too!" which kind of adds to my earlier point that Jack is just a little bit of an MC, (like many great rockers though few would want to admit it.) The song manages to simulate boiling fury with an unholy keyboard solo that sounds like an angry mob clawing at the walls. It seems to be button mashing, but it illustrates the point quite well. Merging with that powerhouse riff is Meg, who is spot-on throughout the album.

If the thunder and lightning of the title track seems to spell doom, the next song is misleadingly welcoming in its sound. With one of the most radio-friendly hooks Jack White ever laid out and the most conventional structure (this album seems to be more built around verse-chorus-solo structure than others.) The song in question is the Earth-shatteringly wicked "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" which follows its easy, exhilarating riff with more accusatory lyrics: "n some respects I suspect you've got a respectable side / When pushed and pulled and pressured, you seldom run and hide / But it's for someone else's benefit, not what yoy want to do..." and though the most direct (and undeniably correct) interpretation of this song is that it's a call for people (probably women) to take control of their romantic lives, it also hits on notions of identity and self-determination that underline this album. Here, we get some real sonic power. Jack White had been "cheating" his "stripped-down" sound for years, overdubbing here and there, notably on the previous albums where marimbas were fleshed out with pianos, but this album is the one that's most overt about it. "You Don't Know What Love Is" wouldn't have the same effect, probably, if the guitars weren't doubled up and underlined with organs. But it remains fairly straightforward and the extra tracks are used as punctuation, not as separate strains. Thank goodness, because Jack already alternates so much between bluntness and dexterity on his guitar that if I had to keep track of him doing it twice at once, my head would explode.

This is followed by "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues." I don't know if "outpour" means rain, but it definitely sounds to me like someone driving down the lonely highway in a rainstorm. The guitar twangs just so in the verses and screeches in the solo. Screechy guitars all over this album. Screechy everything. Sometimes it seems like it's about to pull itself apart, but then it feels even more well-put-together. "300 M.P.H." has that great ragged world-weary sound it seems you can only get after you've been on the road for years and you feel like you've seen it all by now. The opening streak is wrapped up with "Conquest," an intriguing cover-choice about male and female desires (and stereotypes) and grown-ass relationships. It's fleshed out with a flurry of horns that adds menace and fanfare as they battle it out with the guitars.

The album doesn't revel in its stylistic trips like Elephant or Satan (which made a whole unit out of disruption) but they're there and when they crop up between relatively straightforward rock, it's pretty startling. These would be "Conquest" (if the horns are weird to you,) "Prickly Thorn But Sweetly Worn" and its psychedelic twin "St. Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)" and the junk collector blues of "Rag and Bone." That song's mostly been picked over for its metaphor as an explanation of the Stripes' "scrapheap" aesthetic MO, but I don't know how many times I listened to the song before that even occurred to me. Or maybe it had to be explained. All I really knew about the song until then was that it was the main source of vocal Meg on the album but the metaphor is definitely useful as a way of looking at the band's music. I think the point might be less that they pick up other peoples' detritus than that they could make music out of anything they wanted; like old radio monologues and Citizen Kane dialogue, using bagpipes and horns as they so desire. I don't think, never have thought and get annoyed when other people insist, it's about where they got it from more than what they do with it.

"Prickly Thorn" seems to look backward to the rolling hills of Scotland for comfort and a sense of stability. That "Lie-de-lie-de-lie-oh" refrain is something else, brother. That song earns its spot on the otherwise stable record, but I've never really been certain what to make of "St. Andrew." It's weird, but to what value? Is it pleasant to listen to? Does it seem especially deep to somebody? I don't know. I skip it.

Other parts of the album are perfectly normal, in fact more normal-sounding than most of the other Stripes' album cuts, without losing much distinctness. So if they're bland, they're bland on their own terms, which usually keeps them pretty good. "Bone Broke" goes off the rails like a more polished "Girl, You Have No Faith In Medicine," "Little Cream Soda" is effective in its bitter nostalgia, and "Catch Hell Blues" is one of the more interesting modern-blues workouts Jack's gotten on tape, ahead of "Ball & Biscuit" and "Insinct Blues."

But consider three of the four last songs on the album. "I'm Slowly Turning Into You" brings more multitracking in to let the organ peel over the guitars while the vocals are brought to the level of a sermon about retaining individuality, and "A Martyr For Me Love For You," a hard-to-define sorta-bluesy, sorta-rocky sorta-ballad that will have your head bobbing while your face is frozen somberly. I dig the lyrics to the chorus, which bring back that streak of self-immolation that manifested all over the previous three albums. There are two ways to play the blues, I think: with complete confidence or completely broken, and I think Jack's better at the latter. "I could tell a joke / but one of these days I'm bound to choke" he says with uncertain certainty.

But what's more about these great songs is that there are different ways you can read them, like many of the best songs in the group's book. "Slowly Turning Into You" is about retaining one's identity, it could very well mean as a musician rather than as a relationship: referring to the way artists might conform to others' expectations about who they are and what they're supposed to represent (a definite possibility for Mr. White,) and about how the influence of contemporaries and critics is sometimes unavoidable, even when it's undesirable. It's not always easy to "keep your little shell intact." And knowing turned out to be the last album under the White Stripes name, maybe we could see "Martyr For My Love For You" as valediction in case Jack never again managed to hit the heights with his other projects. It is, after all, about giving up a good thing so as to not ruin it.

It all ends with "Effect and Cause," one of the most lyric-smart songs Jack cooked up, a country rocker that warns us not to confuse an end result with its beginnings. The song is one of my favourites to listen to not only for the smartass lyrical content but because it has so much fun complicating this breakup scene it presents. Great send-off, and again, potential for meta-commentary: maybe Jack's telling us not to read too much into this notion of "influences," or maybe he's just singing about a girl acting crazy after a breakup.

Previous White Stripes albums laid their production bare. Simplistically, it always seemed to be "guitar or piano and drums" even when it wasn't literally. You always seemed to be able to pick out each of the elements and let them work on you. Icky Thump is the most self-effacing one of the bunch: unusual in the way it strives not to be so unusual. It's not just because there seems to be more instrumental tracks per song, but because it sheds the overt stylistic risks of all its predecessors: without feeling like he owes it to himself to go all-out to flesh out the "stripped-down" tracks, Jack wrote a bunch of straightforward, enjoyable songs that for the most part don't go out of their way to be weird, and even the weird ones work just because they work.

Give them some credit for being good at what they do. The instruments are all in there to hear when they're needed, and the songs are a great framework for their sound. Simplicity is really just about finding the easiest (and/or most enjoyable) way of saying something more complicated than it should be, getting a direct route to the source of an idea or feeling. That's why their early songs about heartbreak and childhood friends were so charming, but as time went on, their interests changed and so did their methods. So even with all the extra bits, this is one of the simpler albums, and therefore the one with the most appeal. And amidst all this, they don't sound at all unlike themselves: never complacent, never compromising. If all the songs aren't deeply personal, it's because they don't need to be because the surface is musical enough. So much of a band is image anyway, at least they're honest about it.

When Icky Thump was released, the 20-something garage rocker that recorded White Blood Cells was now in his thirties and one of the biggest guitar superstars of his generation. Someone at that standing can't really afford to be worried that he'll "Offend in Every Way." Since this might be the last occasion I get to discuss the matter, I might as well mention I think the band's place in the history books is secured: not because they went out of their way to make major albums, but because they made a bunch of albums that ended up being major anyway. Whether you think he's a man ruled by his influences and his peculiar tastes, or an originator in his own right, I think Jack White always demonstrated through his White Stripes albums that he wasn't content just to do as he was told.





...oh, shit, I just did that thing I said I wasn't gonna do. Oh well, here's videos.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Saturday, February 5, 2011

White Stripes: Get Behind Me Satan

Whether this is good or a bad thing, "Get Behind Me Satan" is definitely the oddball of the White Stripes catalog. I guess I, as a reviewer, can only speculate as to why this album relies more on piano and marimba (?!) than it does on electric guitar. Maybe it was boredom, a desire for something new. Maybe Jack White decided this was the best way to communicate the ideas behind these songs, or maybe he liked the sound and wanted to write sounds that would showcase it. Maybe it was to prove he had a few ideas he wanted to be able to claim as his own: when the fuck has anyone based as good a song as "Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)" around the marimbas?

Whatever you think of this album, it's definitely an interesting item, but the music is tricky enough that it's pretty much never the one I reach for. "Blue Orchid," is my least favourite opener of the four Stripes albums I've got. It feels too basic to be real, too obligatory a rock track compared to the rest of the album. Maybe it's Jack saying "Yeah, I could go on with this forever, but let's see what else I've got in store." In essence, "Blue Orchid" is kind of a lie told to get you into the album. And the first sound you hear after it's over is those marimbas tuning up for their first appearance, "The Nurse."

I make a big deal out of it, because it's a weird friggin' instrument to wedge into your album, let alone on two tracks. The sound you get out of them isn't very thick or substantial, yet they ring with a particular resonance. On "The Nurse," they plink along while an awkward electric guitar punctuates the background with groans. I like the lyrical metaphor of "The Nurse," which goes along with general themes of deception, honesty, truth and misunderstanding, throughout the album.

The better composition is "Forever For Her (Is Over For Me)" which despite its odd, sometimes overly-simple rhymes, gets a good rhythm and manages to fill out the sound of the marimbas with piano to reach a lush culmination of sorrow. I feel like, if that song had been recorded with the guitar, it would have slipped in my estimation. Not that the bells make it better but that it is the best usage of them whereas it would've just been an average guitar ballad. Maybe.

This is all interlaced with two of the best songs on the album, and perhaps two of the more celebrated yet underrated songs of the Stripes catalogue: the ebullient "My Doorbell," a piano-rocker with a wicked-simple chorus, and "The Denial Twist," which is pretty ferocious. Both of these songs manage to root themselves deep in the musical family tree where blues, rock and hip hop (yeah, I said it) are still part of the same whole. I think that's an underrated element of the band's arsenal: they've got rhythm. Dismiss Meg as a drummer all you want, but you can't confuse straightforwardness with ineffectiveness.

After these tracks, the album loses a bit of steam with me that it doesn't recover for some time. "Instinct Blues" is a pretty basic blues exercise, and "White Moon" is a bit too morose and wandering of a ballad for me without offering enough in return. "Passive Manipulation" manages to say more than one sentence repeated for 35 seconds should be able to, and you can take it however you want (including as nothing, if you don't see any value in it: it's only 35 seconds after all.)

"Take, Take, Take," is is a pretty captivating song, though. You can't help but get drawn into the escalating story of Jack imagining himself meeting Rita Hayworth and acting like a total fanboy, and maybe even feel a little bad for him even as Jack's songwriting seems to condemn this type of behaviour. It's pretty blunt, and the whole song seems to halt when it goes into the title-chorus. It's one of those rare moments, and maybe I'm alone in this, (and maybe Jack himself would disagree) where the band sounds a bit like Nirvana. Sure, this is way bouncier, a bit more precise, but I could definitely hear something like "Take, Take, Take" coming out of a more experienced, more worldly Kurt Cobain.

"As Ugly as I Seem" and "Red Rain" are a bit minor for me, but hard to dismiss, and the former benefits from the renewed focus I've got as a listener after "Take." It's a little in line with the more self-pitying moments of White Blood Cells, with its tempo perfectly capturing a sort of "cheer up, man" attitude. The song never does get a release, though, and the narrator is left trapped in his misery at the end, as seen by the repetition of the opening lines at the end. "Red Rain" goes way off the map, starting small with a tiny little guitar sound but getting hard and heavy quick. It's the best guitar song on the CD, and it's got some great lyrics on the themes of truth and lying: I advise you look them up. And you know, there's a song on this album each for Blue, White and Red, and if I were the type to read too much into things, I'd notice that this whole thing was recorded just after the re-election of George W. Bush, but as the band has never really been that explicitly political, it would be kinda stupid of me to pursue that line of thought.

The album closer, "I'm Lonely (But I Ain't That Lonely Yet)" is one of the best piano ballads Jack's written. He gets a lot of great things out of that instrument, it's odd he hadn't used it more. Listen to the way the notes lilt and then halt to emphasize the lyrics, while his voice quivers. It signals a level of despair most of us think we've reached at some point in our lives, just inches away from rock bottom... but not quite there, if we're being honest with ourselves.

I think Get Behind Me Satan is sort of a necessary oddball of the White Stripes catalogue. It's a deliberately weird set of songs recorded in a deliberately weird way. Like I said, any speculation I could offer about why he did it would be useless, I only know that it happened, and it resulted in some music that was... unexpected, but okay. Okay, not great. These aren't the songs that are going to stay with me, that I'll be humming when doing chores or that I set my iPod to. That's the trade-off, I guess, because as a concept it works and yet as music it's less.

The ability to stick with you in your head is of course not everything in music, but it helps; music you're more likely to hum or sing along with is music that gets into you and that is easier to appreciate. The music of Get Behind Me Satan seems to keep me at a distance, intangible like the lover in "Little Ghost." When I hold it, I'm really holding air. Which is a shame, I guess: it's such an impressive experiment, such an interesting piece of work, I almost forget what the songs are actually like. I could go on and on about this contrast, but I'm not sure if anyone feels the same. I think a lot of people like this album because it's so different, and that's certainly a reasonable conclusion. That said, the album is creative enough that it offers you your own choice: take the music on its own, or just the experience of it being made, and in either one, there's potential to enjoy.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Thursday, February 3, 2011

White Stripes: Elephant

This album, and its predecessor, was great music to be young with. It was frustrated, angry, heartbroken, hopeful and creative. It seemed to be about something even when it wasn't, because the chords and vocals and drums were so evocative. It was around this time I really started to think about the way songs are put together. It was impossible to talk about The White Stripes after White Blood Cells without referencing the fact that it was "just" two people, "just" one guitar and a drum set (even though that wasn't literally always the case.) I like the title of this album, because it seems to acknowledge the band has gotten somehow "bigger." It sounds bigger, harder, louder, and maybe a bit less personal. More uncontrollable and undeniable. Maybe that's a comment on the music itself or, as I was partly thinking in my last review, the band's fame and identity... well, for the purposes of this review, it's the former.

If Elephant was a bid to make a hit record, it was a strange way to go about it. Not that the music isn't great, but nothing about Jack White's songwriting has ever said "conventional, compromising hitmaker." "Seven Nation Army" hardly sounds like you'd imagine a hit single, yet to listen to it you can't see it as anything but a juggernaut. It has that swagger, that certainty, that mesmerizing appeal that "Satisfaction" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" has. It builds a whole world around itself in less than four short minutes. It draws you in and ascends higher and higher. Instead of a chorus it (like many White Stripes songs before and after it) features a guitar break. This one is really just an expansion of the intro riff, as it gets bigger and bigger, stretches further and further until nearly snapping. ON the live version from Under The Great White Northern Lights it pretty much does snap, which was a point of contention between me and my co-workers: I liked it, they thought it was shit. It's hard to argue with the studio version, though.

The song sounds like a call to arms that rallies the rest of the album. In it's way, it still sounds measured and smoothed-over compared to most of the other songs. "Black Math," the second track, is too raucous to be contained (and provides a good baseline as to what "The White Stripes" really "sounds" like) and "There's No Home For You Here" finds Jack overdubbing his own voice until he sounds like a chorus or a Satanic rally. The later track, "Ball and Biscuit," is a puzzling mid-album moment: an over-7-minute blues rock workout reminiscent of Led Zeppelin, sitting right in the middle of the album. It's not one of my favourite White Stripes moments, probably due to its jammy nature, but it's a worthwhile oddity. Elsewhere, the album goes off the rails in a more manageable way. Late album tracks like "Hypnotize" and "Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine" exist on a continuum of exhaustion with and desire for the opposite sex. There's a lot to be said about the gender-politics in "No Faith in Medicine," about whether Jack's macho posturing wins over his love interest's fickle, unpleasable nature. Me, I'm just more interested in that crazyass vintage riff and the fact that he managed to create a plausible rhythm-and-rhyme context for "Acetaminophen."

The first half of the album is kind of a goldmine. Their take on the Bacharach/David standard "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" wrings every drop of lonely anguish out of it, remolding it into something akin to "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," but the ringing guitars seem to mock the narrator, rather than sympathize.

Then three of the best tracks on the album occur in a suite of very tonally-different ballads. The first is the slinking, seduction of "In The Cold, Cold Night" where Meg puts her kittenish vocals to it and beckons the listener on. The song is just stripped down enough (with its lanky guitar lines and subtle, subtle organ backing) and Meg's vocals just soft and warm enough to make you feel the need for companionship and want to go, but there's an element of mystery and danger that remains. "I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother's Heart" is a sweet, warm, heartening piano ballad about that most delicate subject: winning approval. Jack sings with such earnestness and desperation that you can't help but feel for the guy. "What kind of cartwheels do I have to pull / What kind of jokes should I lay out now? / I'd be glad to go finish high school / Just to make her notice that I'm around." I love a song like this because it shows sometimes love, that is, romantic love, isn't enough. The girl in the song probably loves Jack just fine, but her mother's disapproval, or plain lack of acknowledgment, is just plain vexing. At its core, it seems to be a song about winning over your toughest critics.

After this track, the album plays a cruel trick on the listener with "You've Got Her In Your Pocket," which uses the sympathy you've gained for Jack's voice on the last track. He switches from the piano to the acoustic guitar to play this soft, weeping ballad... of obsession, possessiveness and jealousy. It's a mean, bitter sort of tune wrapped up in a sweet, sad melody that hides its intentions. "Now she might leave like she's threatened before / Grab hold of her fast before her feet hit the floor / And she's out the door." That last verse, right before the narrator's voice turns from "You" to "I," is a heartbreaker, every time, every damn time.

So "Ball and Biscuit does provide a lengthy breather, and then it's back to the pulse-pounding rock, with "Seven Nation Army's" evil twin, "Hardest Button to Button," which rather than rolling up and down the scale, hits percussively on a few chords (or some such guitar talk, I really don't know all the terminology.) I like this song a lot, I see it as being about the difficulty of finding your place, a theme that somewhat runs through the album, although not explicitly. It's creepy and cool and bristling with stifled irritation. "We're a family, and we're all right now," he says in the bitterest way possible. "Hardest Button" was an even less likely "hit single" than "Seven Nation Army," but still deserving of attention.

My opinion on "Little Acorns" is a bit of a tossup: I think I like the song better knowing its origin, rather than itself. Legend goes that Jack was fiddling around with some piano chords on some random tape he'd acquired, but when he played it back he discovered he'd overdubbed the chords to a recording of this anecdote by Detroit radio personality Mort Crim. So he decided to take the anecdote and write lyrics about it, wrapped around the chords he'd been using. The song itself isn't brilliant, but it's nice enough, and fits the same "found art" niche occupied by "The Union Forever."

I do love "The Air Near My Fingers," which manages to transcend the "boring / snoring" opening line and create a great wordpicture of a man undergoing an anxiety attack. That charging, jumpy rhythm helps, and all throughout the album, in fact all throughout his career, Jack has managed to match up his musical compositions with his lyrics in a way that enhances, rather than playing "mix and match." Most of his songs feel complete in that way. This particular song has that breathless, rambling, circular lyric and the awesomely simple "I get nervous when she comes around" refrain wrapped around this zombie merry-go-round rhythm.

The album ends with the bright, sunny "It's True That We Love One Another," which I think concludes the attempt by White & Co. to hit some kind of record for "average words in title." It's a duet between three people -- a triet? -- Jack, Meg and guest vocalist Holly Golightly. I like that it's not just Jack and Meg singing to one another, because it adds a cute complication to the simplicity of it being "true that we love one another." If it's not the greatest song ever written, it must've been fun to record and it is a bit of a kick to listen to after the weight of the rest of the album.

Anyway, the meanings of the songs as I interpret them aren't as inherent to their enjoyability as I might think. In fact, my own interpretation might differ from day to day, but the songs remain the same. It's a odd bunch of songs that are hard to encapsulate, yet hang together very well. It isn't that it's bleedingly personal or especially deep, it's just that it's deep enough for the music, and the music's powerful enough for the words: all I really know is that chill I get up my spine when the guitar starts to let loose on "Seven Nation Army."

Out of all the Stripes albums I've got, this is the one that I keep coming back to, so there's value in that. Even the tracks I don't really like, I really do like. It's my idea of good, even great, if not utterly transcendent, life-changing music. Lyrically it hits on a good number of contradictions in life without trying too hard to resolve any of them (as no pop rock musician should.) You want something simple, like a woman's love or rock and roll -- and she wants to love you, and rock wants you to play, and you'll fight any army to get with it -- but there are mothers and critics to please, and unforeseen shit you've gotta put up with, and disagreements and joy and obsessions and pain and loss and frustration and failure and just generally irritating difficulties, but in the end it's true that we love one another. And if you can't see the greatness in a record like this, you need to have more faith in the music itself as medicine.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Wednesday, February 2, 2011

White Stripes: White Blood Cells

The announcement this week that The White Stripes are breaking up does not come as a surprise. The band's been largely inactive for years, due at first to Meg's anxiety and Jack's ability to get involved in side-projects that take on lives of their own. Since the last Stripes album in 2007, Jack has recorded three albums with two different bands, and produced various others, including one with Conan O'Brien. As much as I would've liked to see this band be Jack's top priority, it's clear he can and will do whatever he wants, and has enough talent to keep finding success.

It's also given me a timely reason to do something I was going to do anyway, which is go back through the White Stripes' discography and do a retrospective review on the four discs of theirs I've got. I was not planning on doing it so soon, but this week feels like a good time.


When I bought my copy of White Blood Cells, I did not believe there was any future for rock music. I was 15 years old and already sick of the crap on the radio, and starting to look backwards. Then somehow, my generally-ignorant-of-new-music self happened upon a few tracks off this album. By the time I walked out of MusicWorld and popped it in my discman, I could already sing along to "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground" and "We're Going To Be Friends."

"Dead Leaves" is as bold an opening track as I've ever heard, with its guitar squealing painfully into tune, screaming unpolishedness and authenticity. It begins with a tough swagger despite its lyrics, but by the end of it you feel the loneliness implicit in the words as the drums and guitars and repeating lyrics drop out and all that's left is Jack's wailing. The third track, "I'm Finding It Harder To Be a Gentleman" goes the opposite route, building in a welcoming riff around a lyric that has White wondering what role the modern man is supposed to play. It's one of the many occasions here where Jack the lyricist and Jack the gutiarist fuse to create a blockbuster. In between is the country-stomper "Hotel Yorba," which has never been one of my favourites, although I get it. It's a bit more unassuming and basic of an exercise than the tracks that surround it.

Probably where the album comes together most explosively is "Fell In Love With a Girl," the song that pretty much alerted the world to the band's existence. It sounds a little basic in a "Seinfeld Is Unfunny" way, but all the ingredients were there at the right time to make a surprise hit out of this otherwise unknown band. Undeniable at its blistering pace, brimming with life and "ahh-ahh" in-love lyrics, a lot of people probably expected the band to sound that way forever, but they don't even really sound that way elsewhere on the record. Contrast that with the charging, thumping "Expecting" or the sunny pop of "Now Mary," and you've got a good indication that the band, despite its limited tools, wasn't going to let itself be distilled so easily. I've always found attempts to classify their music ineffective and reductive, but then again, I get that way with a lot of stuff.

Anyway, it's that convergence of pop-rock sensibility and indie-experimentalism that made The Stripes a hit (and subsequently made everyone feel really awkward about their follow-up records until Icky Thump.) The band that did "We're Going To Be Friends" also did the ominous "The Union Forever," which is written from a patchwork of pullquotes from Citizen Kane, and "Aluminum," which uses the mechanical nature of the guitar and drums, along with the liquid metal of Jack's voice, to imitate the sound of aluminum being produced. When I was taking a pop music course at University (occasionally I'll refer back to it but I don't mean to get all scholarly) the Prof told us rock is essentially a reaction to the very mechanized world that allows it to exist. Or did I just blow your mind?

"We're Going to Be Friends" is the other worthy hit from the album, of course, and shows just how well the band does gentle sentimentalism. Other groups, when they dare to let themselves get vulnerable, might come off as contrived, whipping up an effective but unspectacular ode to love or lost love or losing love. Jack takes his (apparently very sincere) interest in childhood and crafts a singable melody that doesn't sound the least bit trite or melodramatic. I love the way its lyrics focus on smaller moments. That last verse, "Tonight I'll dream when I'm in bed / Where silly thoughts run through my head / About the bugs and the alphabet / And when I wake tomorrow I'll bet / That you and I will walk together again. / I can tell that we are gonna be friends" just about says it all.

That song is sandwiched between two of my favourite, usually-unnoticed cuts on the album. Leading into it is "The Same Boy You've Always Known," which I've always thought was a bit darker and should not have been used as the set-up. It's a ballad, but a much more complicated, uncertain one about how difficult it is to grow beyond one's past and mend relationships. "The same boy you've always known / Well I guess I haven't grown" is a thought I seemed to keep coming back to as a teenager. The track after "Friends" is a tougher, rock track called "Offend In Every Way," where White feels like he can do nothing but wrong. Like "Expected" and to some degree "Little Room" (more on that later) it's about performing one's duties and living up to expectations. I don't know whether Jack White knew he had a record this size in him when he was recording it, but he seemed at least to be thinking of the consequences if it all went according to plan (which it evidently did.) There's a sense of reflectiveness to this record that from this perspective seems like he's anticipating getting world-weary after his impending stardom, but that could just be hindsight.

After that is where the album starts to get a bit minor. "I Think I Smell a Rat" wraps a spidery riff with some powerful chords and venomous lyrics, and acts as the last guitar showpiece for the album. "I Can't Wait" and "Now Mary" are perfectly good but not nearly as memorable as the first half of the album: the former in fact would sound way too much like mainstream radio rock of the time if it weren't for the fact that nobody was doing those halting riffs and the "yeah-yeah" refrain. "I Can Learn" provides some whispery blues, and "This Protector" is so mysterious that even after 9 years or so, I'm still not sure what I'm hearing when I hear it. Is it a farewell to the garage rock revival that brought the Stripes to the forefront? An abandonment of their post as "Protector" of some kind of movement, ascribed to him by rock journalists before he got big? Or is it a pledge of devotion? Or is it just a weird echoey piano song about a vigilante hero? I don't know.

I haven't mentioned Meg much. She doesn't get a vocal spot on this album beyond dueting on "This Protector" and occasionally cropping up in the background on tracks like "Expecting." I think there's a tendency to malign her basic drumming style but that's kind of the point. No matter how they use it, there's a purity to The White Stripes' sound that comes from being unadorned and never straying too far from their starting point, and it starts with Meg's drumming keeping Jack's feet on the ground. This might be why I haven't bought a Dead Weather CD yet, because I like Jack and Meg together as a band. She keeps him honest.

"Little Room" is the track that runs 50 seconds and features only Jack's vocals and Meg's marching drumbeat. Its lyrics preordain the next decade of Jack's existence: "When you're in your little room / And you're working on something good / But if it's really good / you're gonna need a bigger room / And when you're in the bigger room / You might not know what to do / You might have to think of how you got started sitting in your little room." This album was the last time Jack White would be allowed to work in the little room, and depending who you ask, some might say he lost track of how he got started. I do think the remainder of the Stripes' story was definitely an attempt to work with that, and that it's hard to dismiss any of their output.

But hey, they only just broke up today. I'm not here to sum up their entire career, I'll leave that to others. I just think it's a great excuse to pull this record out again and sit in that room and think.

Buy this album from iTunes now!



Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Locksley: Be In Love

Locksley's first album, "Don't Make Me Wait," took me by surprise in 2009. Here was a band I'd heard nothing about, but whose look intrigued me into sampling a few tracks. And when I decided I liked all of them, I bought the album and found even more pleasure. So it was preordained when they announced their second album for 2010 that I was going to buy it. It was possible my expectations were going to get too high, but after months upon months of listening, I realized this was a better CD. they had refined their sound from a rough, British Invasion throwback into something that takes everything that worked about the past and points it at the future. It's retro without being an imitation. It's current without being contrived. This was my third favourite album of 2010.

As with most great albums, the title seems to say it all: be young, be excited, Be In Love. The album is so in-the-moment, so electrifying and so clear in its desire to get your feet tapping and head bobbing, the rest of the world seems to melt away. At first examination, Locksley's approach to rock seems incredibly basic, even naive, until you realize no band seems to actually sound like this. This is what we call the British Invasion sound, the Beatlemania sound: dance club worthy rock that isn't leaden down by angst or blues. Oh, it isn't an immaturely optimistic record by any means (its subtleties won't hit you until well after the songs have absorbed you) but it's so smart about its complications that you barely even notice where the efforts were made. That's the trick: it seems so natural and so easy, but if it were, you'd hear more like it. You don't. Not in 2010. Maybe not ever.

They come to the party with a nearly endless supply of hooks and melodies. Sometimes they arch, like on "Love You Too" or flow like the gorgeous sentimental "Days of Youth." Probably my favourite is "Darling, It's True," whose triple-ringing riff carries a rhythm of its own and underscores the pleading lyrics without making them seem cloying. This is sharp songcraft.

Freed from the desire to be dazzlingly different on every track (and thus risk running out of ideas,) Locksley creates a batch of songs that never lose their energy, drag or become tiresome. There just enough difference between the tracks, though, to ensure that every one offers its own unique pleasure. After two or three listens you might find yourself singing along without realizing you'd remembered the lyrics. Partly it's that they're good at making music that feels physical, that seems to interact with the listener. A lot of songs feature non-lexical "Oh-ohs" and "Yeah-yeahs," notably the almost parodic "The Whip," which tells a story of impatience and jealousy wrapped up in an irresistible hook, or "On Fire," which breaks free of the pop constraints of the rest of the album and lets you really feel the flames of anguish.

There's a ton of call-and-response here, which adds with the dueling guitars and snappy choruses to make you feel like the band is presenting a unified front, making music that really incorporates all of them. At least three of the four members take vocal duties (I can't tell whether the drummer ever sings or what, but Jesse, Jordan and Kai all have distinct voices that interplay all over it.) One of the best is the back and forth on the nervous "It Isn't Love," or the turn-taking blues of "The World Isn't Waiting." But whenever one of them, most notably Jesse Laz (whose voice is most recognizable on "On Fire," "Darling It's True" and "21st Century") steps to the front, he takes command. Laz has one of the great rock voices of this generation, unpolished yet melodic, like he's channeling young John Lennon. Each vocalist brings something different, though, and the band varies on the theme so extraordinarily well.

The songwriting is strong, too. Though they're always singing about love (or maturity,) it's never in an easy, uncomplicated way. It feels like they stand in the aftermath of young heartbreaks trying to reach back to those days of youth when it was easier, knowing what they know now.

So yeah, here's a band that knows the ins and outs of how to record great rock and roll. I know that, due to the way the market is, this isn't the kind of CD that's going to smash the charts in 2010, but it offers those most necessary of pleasures. It gets in touch with the raw primal desire that motivates kids to pick up guitars generation after generation, and it molds it into something better than I've heard in a long time. Music like this is fairly easily dismissed in critical circles, but you've gotta respect not only the heart and energy that goes into making it, but the effect it produces at that place inside you that remembers what it feels like just to rock. Be in love with this record tonight.

Buy this album (now simply titled "Locksley") on iTunes now!



Locksley's Be In Love is the second installment of my Favourite of 2010 list, after #4, Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record. Though I'm not huge into ratings and rankings, I do enjoy collecting up a small group of albums and telling you "Here's what I really liked in 2010."